The Country Escape. Jane Lovering

      1

      ‘You’ve bought me a pony!’

      As I sailed upwards from the warm comfort of sleep to the sharp-edged day, the words became part of my dream, and I was eleven, the air smelled of horse and the potential excitement that only an eleven-year-old can feel at the thought of mucking-out and cleaning tack into infinity. Then the excitement faded beneath an oncoming darkness, and I was awake, with my fourteen-year-old daughter bouncing on my feet.

      ‘Wha’?’ I said, less than elegant at this time on a September morning. Not that I’m all that elegant even in June, but there’s something about the chill of a late summer morning that makes me think my mother’s cardigan habit wasn’t entirely for show. There was an extra duvet on the bed and I was wearing fleecy pyjamas.

      ‘A pony!’ Poppy bounced on my feet again, reduced by the prospect of a potential equine from the cynical, world-weary teenager to an overexcited nine-year-old. ‘There’s a pony in the orchard!’

      As my dreams had also taken me back to our old life in the London flat, with Luc, even the word ‘orchard’ wasn’t computing. ‘Wha’?’ I said again, struggling upright under the bouncing. The cold air hit me as I exited the duvet and with it came the whole of past life, hitting me around the head. ‘Oh.’

      Whump went the sand-filled sock of memory as I stared at the bare walls of my bedroom, the tiny low window, which managed to let in as much cold air closed as open, and the dusty light of the old sun filtering through cobwebs I hadn’t yet had the heart to disperse. Dorset, not London. Small house, not flat. And, apparently, an orchard, which I now remembered was what Poppy had decided to call the overgrown patch of land that adjoined the house. Too big and uncultivated to be a garden and too small to be a field, the borrowed dignity of a couple of mossy old apple trees had designated it its orchard status.

      ‘Well?’ Poppy had her hands on her hips. ‘Did you buy me a pony?’

      With the habit of motherhood I noticed that she was still wearing her pyjamas, despite it being a school morning, and went straight to the practicalities. ‘Go and get ready for school or you’ll miss the bus.’

      ‘Aren’t you even going to look?’ A humphy sigh, of the kind I’d got used to. ‘Because if you didn’t, and Dad didn’t, then someone has parked a pony outside, and I’m pretty sure that’s, like, a criminal offence?’ She slithered the long body that she still despised, although it could only be a year or so away from being her best asset, off the bed and stomped across the creaky boards. ‘And I’m going down to see him.’

      ‘Get dressed first!’ I called after her, pointlessly. It had been one of the many shocks of motherhood that the daughter who’d idolised me for the first five years of her life could come so quickly to the realisation that, basically, I was there to provide for her and keep her from harm, despite her increasing ability to outdo my ability to perform either of these tasks. She knew that I knew I couldn’t make her do anything. There was a lot of reverse psychology going on, that’s all I’ll say.

      In the spirit of ‘don’t do as I do’, I dashed down the creaky, narrow-boarded stairs, trailing in the wake of Poppy, out across the stone-flagged kitchen into the orchard. The sun was up now, its low-level slant flinging the shadows of the trees back towards the house. There was a smell of incipient cider from a few windfalls, and the threatening hum of wasps starting the day’s motor.

      By the time I caught up, Poppy was at the far side of the field, where the narrow hawthorn hedge bordered the lane. And she was stroking the nose of something that could only be called a pony because the phrase ‘badly put-together cow’ was already taken. I called a token, ‘Be careful,’ across the grass but she didn’t even acknowledge that I’d spoken.

      ‘Isn’t he beautiful?’ she breathed. ‘Where do you think he came from, Mum? Dad wouldn’t give me a pony. Would he?’ she finished on a note that was part acceptance of her father’s fickle and profligate nature, and part a deep hope.

      I looked over the slightly sway back of the piebald pony, to the gateway that led into the orchard. ‘I’d say, just at a rough guess…’ I tried to keep the sarcasm out of my words, but I knew she’d reinsert it anyway ‘… he’s from that.’

      Parked in the pull-in, where the lane became